On Nov. 15, three Tucker Paving team members went back to the school — all the way back to elementary school.

Following an invitation from Elbert Elementary School in Winter Haven, Ray Curtis, Shawn Signore and Mack Banner represented our company during the school’s annual Great American Teach-In event.

The Teach-In was a great opportunity to teach a bunch of local youngsters about the wonderful world of construction — road construction, in particular. Ray, Shawn, and Mack arrived at the school with lots of show-and-tell items, including hard hats, bright yellow safety vests, orange safety cones and a variety of traffic work zone safety signs, with one of our many ROAD WORK AHEAD signs among them.

At one point during the Teach-In, in a fun bit of learning for the kids (and in a fun bit of teaching by our guys), several of the students pretended to be vehicles traveling through a road construction site and responding to a flagman’s instructions, using signs on a pole, to STOP or go SLOW. (See the three photos we posted Nov. 28 to our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/tuckerpaving.)

If you’re only vaguely familiar with the Great American Teach-In, it’s an opportunity to connect classrooms to community — a chance for community members and business representatives to visit local schools, share what they do and how and why they do it, and share how their schooling helped them to achieve success.

The Great American Teach-In is held in schools all across the country each year as part of American Education Week, celebrated each November in the week prior to Thanksgiving week. Next year, in 2017, American Education Week will be observed Nov. 13-17. If you’d like a team from Tucker Paving to visit your school for the Great American Teach-In, give us a call at 863-299-2262 and we’ll see what we can work out.

Tucker Paving is totally immersed in construction and big on employee and work zone safety, so it won’t come as any surprise to learn that news reports about construction and construction workers tend to get our complete attention.

Recently, our attention was drawn to a local television report about a 50-year-old British construction worker who had developed an acute case of hepatitis — apparently by doing something that sounds on the surface to be so innocent. That would be the consumption of energy drinks.

However, this wasn’t just your routine consumer of energy drinks. This was a super consumer, someone who drank up to five cans worth of the energy-producing mix per day for a solid three weeks to help keep up with his heavy workload.

According to the TV news report, based on an article from Scripps Media, the construction worker ended up in the hospital with nausea, vomiting, and yellow-looking eyes and skin. Doctors later diagnosed him with hepatitis C, which causes inflammation of the liver, and they traced the likely cause to a toxic level of the niacin, or vitamin B3, found in the energy drinks he had been consuming so much.

The Scripps Media report (you can read it in full at http://bit.ly/2goer0H) included this warning from the British Medical Journal: “We hope patients will be educated about the potential risks of energy drink overconsumption, and thus, many unnecessary liver injuries will be prevented.”

This whole episode reminds us about the cautionary quote: “Moderation in all things.” When it comes to energy drinks, moderation in consumption might just keep you hepatitis free and out of the hospital ER.

THE NORTH CENTRAL LANDFILL is much more than the Polk County dump. It might not be noticeable from the outside, but on the inside it’s a very sophisticated and technologically advanced operation. We’ve even heard it described as a local “modern marvel.”

Today, the working parts of the county’s landfill property, located west of Winter Haven off Winter Lake Road (State Road 540), are larger than they were a year ago. Working with a new customer, COMANCO Environmental Corporation, Tucker Paving Inc. had a nice paving role in a major landfill expansion that wrapped up just recently.

The Plant City-based COMANCO company, a leading national provider of services in the geosynthetics marketplace, spearheaded all of the landfill construction work. Here’s what the company had to say in an Oct. 26 post on its Facebook site (http://bit.ly/2frL6Tt):

“COMANCO’s Superintendent Nathan Wilfong reporting ‘Live From the Field’ at the Polk County Landfill in Florida. This year-long landfill expansion project is finally complete as the COMANCO team demobilized from the site this week. COMANCO completed the 30-acre landfill cell which included a five layer geosynthetic system, leachate collection pipe and gravel, protective sand cover, rain tarp installation, site work which included the installation of new asphalt access roads, concrete pump station pads, and the surrounding stormwater system of the new cell. The crew did an excellent job to deliver the best quality product while keeping their focus on safety.”

COMANCO’s core services are liner/geosynthetics, pipework, gas collection, and earthmoving. Three partners, Mark Topp, T.R. Johnson, and Bob Johnson, started the company as an environmental and civil construction firm in 1989, five years before the launch of Tucker Paving. COMANCO is an acronym for COstruction MANagement COmpany. Originally based in Tampa, the company has operated from headquarters in Plant City since mid-2005. The company also has an office in Reno, Nev., and more than 250 employees overall.

According to the company’s website — http://comanco.com — COMANCO has been recognized every year since 2004 by Engineering News Record as one of the top 200 environmental companies in America. The company reports that it has completed more than 3,000 projects in 27 years and that it installs more than 100 million square feet of geosynthetic liner every year.

The management of Tucker Paving is pleased that it had the opportunity to work with COMANCO on the big landfill project, and it’s happy to now be associated with one of the nation’s most prestigious construction companies in the environmental services sector.

GENERAL AVIATION within a 25-mile radius of Winter Haven — most of Polk County, for all practical purposes — produces a total economic impact of more than $354.8 million each year. That’s according to the latest information available from the Alliance for Aviation Across America (www.aviationacrossamerica.com), and the dollar amount probably is a conservative one.

Winter Haven Municipal Airport’s contribution to the total is about $20.8 million annually, or about 5.9 percent, the alliance reports. When a couple of projects involving Tucker Paving are both complete, Winter Haven’s airport at Gilbert Field very likely will be better positioned to have a much greater impact on the county economy.

Winter Haven city leaders have, for a long time, wanted to make the airport property along U.S. Highway 92 available for more commercial and industrial development, and they recognized the need for another north-side (terminal-side) airport entrance road. Tucker Paving was fortunate to get the job to build this road, and work started Sept. 12 at the signaled intersection where Lynchburg Road meets the well-traveled U.S. 92.

Later, on Oct. 24, the Winter Haven City Commission voted unanimously to award our company the bid to extend the airport’s landing strip taxiways. The project cost is about $4.1 million, with 90 percent of the total coming from the Federal Aviation Administration and with the Florida Department of Transportation and the city of Winter Haven each picking up 5 percent of the cost, or about $205,000 each.

Both of these airport projects are nice ones for Tucker Paving, and the company’s management and employees are grateful for them. We’re also pleased to know there’s a good chance our work will lead to more good things for the airport in the arenas of industry, commerce, and overall economic development. We get the sense that Winter Haven Municipal Airport is an economic sleeping giant that’s just on the brink of waking up and taking off.